9 comments:

I'm delighted to see the Society for the Protection of unborn Children hosting the American Right who are so much better than our own tepid bishops (as Peter Hitchens said, who the hell does Vincent Nicholls think he is, telling British people "immigrants are people too"; bore off).

In a speech in northern England at a conference organized by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children and Voice of the Family, Cardinal Burke said that our societies can “no longer be called Christian” and called for a movement of re-evangelization, starting from scratch.

“In our day, our witness to the splendor of the truth about marriage must be limpid and heroic,” he said. “We must be ready to suffer, as Christians have suffered down the ages, to honor and foster Holy Matrimony.”

He is a grandstanding clown, going on about martyrdom and deliberately drawing comparisons between himself and St John Fisher. Thankfully, he is ignored.

Carrying on with the rump of SPUC only proves that he is figure on the fringe of the fringe. Even its long-serving Director, a Papal Dame, long ago resigned all connection with that. I am still on its mailing list, but I am on a lot of mailing lists, and it has always been something like impossible to leave.

That Communion business only ever seems to have existed in America. Neither John Paul nor Benedict ever even attempted to enforce it anywhere else.

Only people on the mailing lists of things like SPUC would ever have heard of it over here, and even we viewed it as the kind of thing that went on over there, "say no more".

It has a stereotypically American lack of subtlety to it, and Americans are notorious for assuming their own cultural and political peculiarities to be universally normative.

I mean, just try and imagine it anywhere else, and certainly anywhere in Europe. Well, there you are, then.

John Paul and Benedict probably just arched their eyebrows and said, "The Americans are different," as cultured Europeans are wont to do.

But a New World Pope will be having none of that. And doesn't Cardinal Burke know it?

I am around it, in that I have friends in it. But I am neither Opus Dei nor Oxford, which are its partly overlapping bases, pretty much.

It is interesting that something with such roots is broadly (not entirely, but broadly) Old and Blue Labour, including a fairly recent Lord Mayor of Oxford who remains a Councillor in, as people are often surprised to learn, that rather Old Labour city.

The last two indulged that kind of American because they were Central European intellectuals who assumed the British hardly read and the Americans hardly could. At any rate Britons who hardly read and Americans who hardly could had to be forgiven, look what they had grown up with. But there is none of that from an Argentinian.

They tried it in Mexico but the point still stands, the idea of it in Europe is laughable. Francis though is understandably not of the view that mere colonials are expected to be as unsophisticated as they please. Nor is he sympathetic towards an elderly Irish-American priest who wonders why nobody licks his boots like they used to.